DS: Is a macaw in the hand worth two in the South American jungle? There could be different answers to that, but a macaw in the hand may be more than just a tourist attraction. Some people say that our fascination with nature, with all sorts and kinds of living things, is an illustration of some fundamental need that we humans have for contact with non-human nature. Whether we actually need nature is a good question. But we certainly do use nature, or parts of it, all the time. For example, in places like this, for our entertainment.


Parrot: Aaahh, it's springtime!  When it’s springtime . . .

DS: Animals have been used for human entertainment for centuries. Why do we enjoy watching animals? What’s the fascination?

DS: Are we attracted by the beauty of controlled power in motion? Or perhaps, in this case, titillation? We all know the shark stories.

ALLIGATOR TRAINER: These alligators will actually grab onto the limb, or maybe the mouth or maybe the tail of another alligator, it will rip it right off. Again, alligators are extremely dangerous. If you should see one out in the wild, it’s in your best interest to take a picture of it. Otherwise leave it alone. You run the risk of losing a body part such as a hand. Now this is not natural behavior, for an alligator to jump out of the water like this to get his food. An alligator that you find out in the wild, it will catch turtles, snakes, waterfowl, anything that it can sink their teeth into.

DS: An experience of nature.

DS: Melodrama, a haunted house, a missing will, a captive audience, and captive clowns.

DS: The spiels speaks for themselves, the animals cannot.

DS: There is the sound of madness.

DS: There’s a feeling of weird incongruity about all this, a sort of dislocation. But it sure packs them in. You can’t help wondering why. What is the entertainment value? What are we getting out of it? Why do we laugh? Is this funny?

DS: If it is funny, why is it funny? Because it’s so absurd? Because the birds in their own inept way are trying so hard to be like us? Because we can do it better? Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps it’s flattering to us in some convoluted way, reinforcing the human superiority imperative. One thing that’s definitely not funny is the physical and psychological torment the animals endured in what we like to call their training, meaning their operant conditioning. This bird has been driven, literally, crazy.

Parrot: Polly wanna cracker, Polly wanna cracker . . .

Trainer: Can you say hello? Can you say goodbye?

DS: The closer to home it gets, the better we seem to like it.

DS: In a cell behind the audience, a gorilla watches.

DS: The sound is the sound of bedlam. The gorilla hears-- or does its mind any longer take in anything at all?

DS: The view from the cage, a window on the world, the human world. The human animal believes it has the divine right to hold other animals at its pleasure. For its pleasure. There is no pleasure for them. They live to escape.

DS: These are not domesticated animals, bred to live with us. They are captive wild animals, forcibly held for commercial purposes, living, sensate beings, market commodity goods for our entertainment; perishable commodities.

DS: Nobody pays admission to see the ignominious passing of a wilted caged bird, but thousands applaud the bloody and prolonged butchering of a large mammal with full ritualistic ceremony. It’s scarcely a contest. The result is preordained. With much panache and showmanship on the part of his torturer, the bull will be systematically tired and weakened until he can no longer defend himself.

DS: The horses are drugged, and cannot see or hear.

DS: Long darts add to the bull’s agony, exciting further, bleeding profusely

DS: The bull is now near exhausted and his executioner can pirouette in safety.

DS: At last the sword is paraded for the audience. The plunge is deep.

DS: One more ritual victory. Man over nature.

DS: There is ritual also, and ceremony, in the recreational killing of large mammals, not for the entertainment of an audience but for the hunter.

DS: A female wapiti hears the calling of running males, and the hunter's invitation.

DS: The males hear also, and respond.

DS: Trophy hunters claim an ineffable quality of communion with their targets, respect, humility, intimacy, purity, and fair sporting contest between equals.

DS: The bull wapiti, however, doesn’t know he’s in a sporting contest.

DS: Trophy hunters assume they have the right to kill for recreation, and that non-human beings are human chattel.

DS: There’s no doubt that the photographer is also using the animal, and also for recreation, but there’s a profound difference.

DS: There’s a difference too nowadays in the lengths to which nature photographers are willing to go. The Galapagos Islands used to be one of the ends of the earth. Not any longer.

DS: Tourists now come in waves, so many of them that areas have had to be cordoned off to protect the wildlife

DS: The display of the frigate bird makes a splendid photograph. But how many photographers can this tiny archipelago tolerate? We’re in danger of loving wild nature to death. Ironically, nature now has to be defended from those who admire it most. It’s the same all over the world.

DS: In the African parks today, almost any large mammal means a traffic jam.

DS: Sometimes it’s hard to know whether the animals have become blasé or whether they have no place else to go. There are now lots of people for whom Africa is old hat. For them, Antarctica.

DS: We always want to get as close to the animals as we possibly can. We want to touch, to contact, to make a personal connection with nature.

DS: Many of these tourists may not be practicing naturalists when they begin their holiday. A few may become so. Others perhaps will want to involve themselves in nature preservation, or at the very least, will be more aware of endangered wildlife.

DS: And there will always be those who are more interested in travel for its own sake, adding another country, another crossword puzzle species, to their scrapbooks.

DS: There are lots of motives for nature tourism, a growth industry of our time. What it will do for the future of wildlife remains to be seen. What it does for the tourist is not always clear.

DS: Wildlife in its role as entertainment for the cocktail hour. These nature trips to exotic places can be pretty expensive. And I suppose we could see them as just one more form of conspicuous consumption. The animals aren’t being literally consumed. But we can see wildlife as part of the package, part of the commodity that is sold to the customer by the tourist business. But there’s more to it than that. There’s simply no denying that our experience with non-human beings has a special quality. It's different from our experience with other humans. And that special quality is there in all of us. At perhaps the most obvious level, all we’ve got to do is watch a boy and his dog.

DS: A primary need of every social being, dogs and people included, is to belong, to have a place. That place and the identity it represents can be defined only in terms of the group. No social being is an island. Grooming is not just for primates. It’s continuing reinforcement of belongingness, for both the individual and the group, strengthening the bond. Each member of the family group has a personal being, the meaning of which comes from the others.

DS: Human beings and dog beings do so well together because both are social animals. And especially because both are socially cooperative. Neither is a loner by nature. Both must have group identity.

DS: Identity is much more than individuality. Identity is being within a context, and the context is others. Constant touching and checking reaffirm the coherence of the group being, which is oneself. Playing is essential. Even loafing is a social activity.

DS: Apart from hunting, no group activity seems more important than celebration.

DS: Constant contact, keeping in touch. The wolves become more active, even restless, before the hunt or before eating.

DS: Bunched on the move, individuals manage to stay in touch by gentle brushes against each other, occasional little bumps: here I am, with you.

DS: The lone wolf is a rarity, mostly folklore.

DS: Remember the fairy tale stereotypes, evil, viciousness, cruelty? Frontier superstitions die hard.

DS: We can see a group identity, a group self, but there may be an even greater self identity. One made not only of wolves, but of non-wolf nature.

DS: The sense of place, of belonging, may be even more than social. Perhaps living beings are bonded to their total surround. Wolves, ravens, deer, spruce woods, snow, one entity, one being.

DS: There’s nothing new about social bonding. But it may be that these children, like the wolves, are forming an even deeper level of self-identification: with trees, with snow, with sunlight and winter air, with nature.

DS: So far we’ve been exploring our relationship with nature and the possibility of our need for nature, mostly in terms of animals, animals as curiosities, as entertainers, as victims, as commodities, as companions, and of course, animals as ourselves. But nature is more than animals. Much more numerous than any animals are the plants. And our contact with plants is much more frequent than with any other living aspect of nature. We’re rarely very far from plants. Take, for example, gardens.

DS: Gardens, like architecture, are expressions of their time. This could only be the Italian Renaissance, 16th century, a time of rejoicing in the human intellect, the technical control of plants, and the taming and redirection of water. All very ordered, all very controlled, the scientific control of nature, which is what the Renaissance was all about.

DS: This great garden at Stourhead, in England, was actually composed to mimic a landscape painting, not to mimic nature. Paintings show us what nature is supposed to look like. A landscape like this one looks picturesque, because it reminds us of a picture. The inspiration of the designer was not nature, but art.

DS: In these gardens, nature becomes a cultural artifact, a human creation, adorned with classical themes of all kinds. Plenty of romantic grottos.

DS: Romantic Arcadia, complete with sheep, if not shepherdesses. In the late 1700s, the English designer Capability Brown would inventory a site for its capability to become a landscape, not for its intrinsic worth. He meant its capability to be brought into being by him. Every tree was individually placed, designed in. Nature had no meaning until its potential could be realized by the human designer.

DS: By Victorian times, designers were trying smaller-scale, tidier, more manageable gardens. The vast green semi-natural landscapes were replaced by neat terraces, and small, controllable gardens.

DS: In the early 1900s, the style had become a bit of a mix of all that had gone before. But there was a special emphasis on borders. Some were vaguely natural. Others were as clinically mathematical as those of the Renaissance. But more and more there was a trend toward naturalism, at least in sheer density and variety. We want plants to please us aesthetically, but we also want them to perform as expected, to stay put, for one thing, and to bloom abundantly when they’re supposed to, to be obedient pets.

DS: We don’t have to go to grand historical European gardens to see plant life. Plants have become ubiquitous, even in the downtown core. Not many wild plants could get a roothold here. The plants we see are not there by accident or by their own initiative. Somebody put them there and somebody takes care of them.

DS: Corner flower shops have proliferated like the plants themselves. And this isn’t by accident either. We used to buy plants mostly as gifts; we still do. But now we also buy plants for ourselves, almost as a matter of course.

DS: Public demand means supply, and lots of it. Here in a Florida greenhouse, the mass production lines.

DS: The market would seem to be insatiable. Plants are nice things to handle. They feel good, they’re alive. And they’re nice things just to be around. If a little urban parkette means anything, it means at least some grass, a few flowers, something living that’s not just more of us. We throng to these tiny oases. We don't go because it’s the latest fad. We go because we want to, we’re drawn to them.

DS: New subdivisions are usually named in memory of whatever they’ve destroyed. "Whispering Woodlands". The first thing everybody does is start planting. This is no whim. It’s necessary. We need to have contact with something that’s alive and is not human. We crave the greater self-identity that transcends one species alone. Like the wolf, we need the ancient bond.

DS: For most of us, whether at home or on holiday, the ancient bond with nature is obscured by the heavy hand of commerce--the heavy plastic hand of commerce. But notice the theme of this commercial interior. It may be grotesque, but at least it suggests nature.

DS: It uses nature. Do the merchants know something the rest of us don’t? Some people call this ecoporn. The connection between the product and the setting is pretty tenuous, but it’s not accidental. It works, or the advertisers wouldn’t be doing it. Perhaps the more far- fetched the connection, the greater the impact.

DS: Snakes are evil, or at least naughty.

DS: Teeth and claws attract the he-man.

DS: Cats are unpredictable, dangerous, sexy.

DS: If nothing else, advertising tells us what our stereotypes are.

DS: Presumably, this is about masculinity. Strength, individuality, independence. Cowboys are the very model of machismo.

DS: Not all the cowboys are in the cigarette advertisements. There are still some real-life ones, and the place to see them is a western institution, the rodeo.

DS: Rodeo is a continuing tournament between itinerant full-time professional contestants. Although the heroes are the human competitors, rodeo needs animals, plenty of them.

DS: Beneath all this wild and violent confusion, there is a code of very strict rules and conventions. There are also some clues to the frontier perception of the relation between man and animal, man and nature.

DS: There’s a great deal more going on than meets the eye. An intensive and penetrating study of the implications of rodeo has recently been published. The author has the special insights of both the veterinarian and the cultural anthropologist, Dr. Elizabeth Lorenz.

Elizabeth Lorenz: There are many themes being expounded in rodeo. One of the foremost, of course, of these is the conquest of nature, not only the value of this conquest, but actually the imperative that mankind should conquer nature. But also in rodeo there is evidence of the human feeling of ambivalence toward this conquest. It’s not always what we seem to want, we want to leave some leeway for the wild in the world so that there’s still something left to conquer. The rodeo is not only a regional heritage, but it’s also an American heritage. The American cowboy seems to represent America not only to ourselves in this country, but to many people throughout the world.

EL: A very interesting thing has been developing in which people are trying to breed these broncs for the bucking quality, specifically selecting genetic strains that would exhibit this bucking quality. In other words, they’re trying to breed the buck back into the horses on special farms and even have plans to accomplish this through embryo transplant. This is a really very interesting phenomenon because for centuries mankind has bred horses to try to make them docile and quiet and useful to our purposes. Now, all of a sudden, we’re trying to breed them to  buck and to oppose mankind. I think that says a lot about the value system that rodeos perpetuate because we value this wildness, we value the process of trying to tame it, but we also value the wildness itself.

EL: In this saddle-bronc riding event, in contrast to the bareback riding event, the rider has much more equipment to use on the horse, he has a trimmed-down western saddle, and he has a halter and rein, which allow him more control over the animal. So the process of changing a wild bronc into a ranch partner is dramatized. This event is considered to be the classic event of rodeo, often called the cornerstone of rodeo.

EL: The tremendous valuation placed on what we in our society term masculine characteristics, a whole complex of traits such as physical strength, stoicism in the face of pain, mastery, and a kind of macho characteristic, bravery, a certain code of honor that these contestants comply with. All of these things are thought to be, in our society at least, exalted masculine characteristics. These are the qualities that were necessary for a herder of wild animals on the cattle frontier and that were necessary for the survival of people on the frontier. The horse in this event is given a great deal of credit, some rodeo people say 70 to 75% of the winning in this event should be credited to the horse because it’s such an important partner. The horse has to pull back on the rope just in a certain way to allow the contestant to tie the calf, and has to have so-called cow sense about this, which is much admired in a ranch horse

DS: It’s a little hard on the small calf.

DS: This one has been killed.

EL: One of the main things that is being played out in rodeo also is this idea of the American cowboy as the greatest rugged individualist. The contestants themselves have often told me that they think of themselves that way. They think that riding a bull, for example, is the last individualistic thing that person can do in this kind of, you know, mechanized age. And there is this quality about rodeo, that rodeo people belong to in general, they don’t belong to teams. It’s not a team effort, it’s an individual effort. It’s the archetypal image of a man versus the animal all alone in the arena. But in another sense, they are a very conforming group of people, they do have standards among the rodeo cowboys themselves as to how they should act and how they should dress, they often seem to talk alike and think alike about various things, they look upon the world the same way,  they usually look upon animals and nature the same way. So there is this conforming quality, which is in opposition to this rugged individualism which we see played out in the arena.

DS: There are a lot of contrasts in rodeo, not only conformity and individuality, but also wildness and tameness. The cowboy needs the wild in order to show his ability to tame it. He needs a savage enemy in order to show his strength and toughness. He needs a symbol of wildness, in this case the bull, in order to meet its challenge. Rodeo, in a ritualistic way, reenacts and celebrates the ongoing, never-ending human struggle with nature.

DS: The morality myth of human supremacy, man defeats animal, is told over and over again

DS: The race is against the clock. The role of the steer is not even as a bit player. It’s a prop. The animals are seen not as living beings, but as objects to demonstrate the human control. Since the steer is a mere object, the pressure on its eyeball is not the problem. No proper cowboy would cut his rope. It has to be worked on.

DS: Rodeo, the ceremonial performance of the domination of nature, man over beast. 

DS: Who needs nature? The frontier ethos must have nature, at the very least in symbolic form, in order to reaffirm itself, perpetuate itself.

DS: One way or another, the uses and abuses of non-human nature surround us constantly, every day of our lives. We don’t see a rodeo every day. But we see lots of cowboys in newspapers and magazines and television most days. And we also see a great many animals. But by far the most widespread use of animal themes is contained in materials for children: stuffed toys, TV commercials, storybooks, comic strips, amusement parks, you name it, if it's for the consumption of young children, it will be very heavy on nature, especially animals. Nature, it seems, is kids' stuff.

DS: The adult world designs the costumes, the kids don’t. Showbiz is a far cry from nature. Maybe we adults don’t want to be too natural, that might destroy the illusion. The adult illusion is the anthropomorphic world, the world in our image. Animals as comic parodies. But not perhaps in a child’s world. Kids seem to prefer the real thing. That macaw's costume is designed by macaws, not by cartoonists. There’s a difference. And in spite of adult pressure, kids know it.

DS: Young children must have experience, including contact with non-human beings. Children, like wolves, must bond with their surround. They must identify themselves within the broader context of biological existence. They must imprint themselves on that which is not human in order to grow up whole, as fully developed beings. If they don’t have that experience, as adults they may well commit such travesties as this.

DS: These of course are no longer animals. They are retarded humans, pseudo humans.

DS: That they were once animals is no longer relevant. The animal is reduced to a comic strip stereotype. A comical sidekick, trying so hard to be just like us.

DS: Is this funny? Is this?

DS: People used to entertain themselves by watching lunatics and monsters. They still do.

DS: Brainwashed captives, people dressed as animals, animals dressed as people, a theater of the grotesque. Nature? Box office.

DS: Who needs nature? Many of the strange, even bizarre, representations of nature that we encountered don’t recall much of the primal experience of the human place in nature. But they may very well serve as reminders of these. Certainly animals have a very strong attraction for children. This is no accident. It’s often shamelessly exploited, but it is real. They need it. Children must have contact with the real thing. All of us need nature both physically and psychologically. But the young ones must have it. And the earlier, the better. These young animals will grow much bigger, very rapid, but they won’t ever really grow up. That’s because they’re domesticated animals. We’ll explore domestication next week.

DS: For thousands of years, we have domesticated animals, selected them over generations for certain characteristics. Are we seeing similar characteristics in ourselves as we become the domesticates of our own technology? Next week, the ultimate slavery, the process of domestication and its implications.